international relationshistory study of world diplomacy and events from the period of World War I to the last decade of the 20th century.relations of states with each other and with international organizations and certain subnational entities (e.g., bureaucracies and political parties).

The field of international relations emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, largely in the West and particularly in the United States as that country grew in power and influence. Its prime focus is diplomatic history, or the history of world diplomacy and events. The purpose of diplomatic history is to explain the origins and the effects of foreign policies, and its focus is each country’s policy-making elite. This involves the historian at once in a complication, however. The statesman exists simultaneously in two realms: the domestic political system whence his authority derives, and the international system in which he represents his state to the world. Pressures and problems, temptations and opportunities arise constantly from both realms. Which one ought to command the historian’s attention? The founders of modern diplomatic history, beginning with Leopold von Ranke, propounded a view known as “the primacy of foreign policy.” Founded on German Idealist philosophy, Rankeanism asserted the primary influence of a state’s geography and external threats in the shaping not only of its foreign policy but of its internal military, political, and cultural institutions as well. An island kingdom like Britain, for instance, free of the constant threat of invasion, could militarily afford and commercially benefit from liberal institutions. Prussia, by contrast, relatively poor and surrounded by potential enemies, required for its survival as a state rigorous centralization and militarization.

The primacy of foreign policy was especially plausible to historians immersed in the diplomacy of medieval and early modern Europe, when foreign policy was a virtual monopoly of the prince and his advisers. The rationalist bias of the Enlightenment reinforced the notion of the international state-system as a kind of self-regulating Newtonian universe in which states revolved about each other in alliance or war according to natural laws of self-interest and balance of power. A wise ruler like Frederick II the Great of Prussia saw himself as “the first servant of the state” and made policy according to raison d’état, the prudent and rational dictate of dynastic interest. This model of the international system, while reductionist, was not determinist, since it made room for the wisdom and folly, courage and cowardice of individual rulers.

The debate over the origins of World War I, and the failure of documentary reconstruction of the diplomatic narrative to resolve the question of responsibility for 1914, threw diplomatic history into a crisis. By the late 1920s historians like Sidney Fay and Pierre Renouvin were looking beyond the documents for the deeper causes of the war, such as militarism or imperialism. Historians influenced by sociology and economics, in turn, located the seeds of the fateful foreign policies preceding the war in the economic and social conflicts of prewar Europe. A young German, Eckhart Kehr, turned Ranke on his head by postulating a “primacy of domestic policy” and argued that a state’s foreign policy derives from domestic social and political forces, not vice versa. In particular, imperialism and militarism were seen to be defensive strategies by which threatened elites attempted to rally their people against a foreign threat as distraction from social tensions at home. If the old history was simplistic and dangerous in its glamorization of the exercise of power, the theory of primacy of domestic policy tended to ignore the fact that governments are obliged to respond to real pressures from abroad regardless of their domestic situation. An empirical approach, therefore, is to examine the internal sources of foreign policy in all states and also the effects of those policies on all other states as they are transmitted through the international system.

The conduct and analysis of diplomacy and war ultimately rest on a calculus of the power of each state in the system and of its perception by others. National power is the product of all those assets, human and material, that contribute to a state’s ability to influence the behaviour of other states by force, threat, or inducement. Human sources of power include population, educational level and work discipline, morale, motivation (through ideology, patriotism, or charismatic leadership), and skill in military and civil administration. Material resources include land area and climate, geographic location, raw materials, and agricultural resources. Last but not least is technology, which is a function of both human and material resources and which can alter the importance of population and geography and render once-effective administrative systems obsolete. Despite the best efforts of political scientists and military planners, these elements of national power are difficult to quantify and compare. Hence misperception by one state of another’s capabilities and intentions is almost the rule rather than the exception. This is why those elusive assets prestige and intelligence are sometimes decisive in diplomacy and war.

International relations are shaped primarily by those states perceived to be Great Powers, countries whose interests and capabilities transcend their own self-defense or region. For some 200 years after the treaties of Utrecht and Nystad (1713–14, 1721), the roster of the Great Powers included the same five states: Great Britain, France, Prussia (and, later, Germany), the Habsburg monarchy (Austria), and Russia. A mere three decades after World War I, however, only one of these venerable powers, Britain, had not undergone two or more radical changes of government, and only one, Russia, was still a Great Power. Between 1914 and 1945 the European system committed suicide, and two global superpowers rose to replace it. Five decades after 1945, the Soviet Union was no more, while the ability of the United States to control events was in turn challenged from many sources, giving rise to speculation that the world might be shifting back into a multipolar balance-of-power system.

This article provides a single integrated narrative of world diplomacy and politics from the outbreak of World War I to the 1990s. Its twin themes are the rivalries of the Great Powers during the age of the world wars and the Cold War and the replacement, largely through the agency of those wars, of the European state system by a world system with many centres of both power and discord. Because domestic affairs figure heavily in the analysis of each state’s foreign policies, the reader should consult the histories of the individual countries for more detail.

For discussion of the military strategy, tactics, and conduct of World War I and World War II, see World Wars, The.

The roots of World War I, 1871–1914

Forty-three years of peace among the Great Powers of Europe came to an end in 1914, when an act of political terrorism provoked two great alliance systems into mortal combat. The South Slav campaign against Austrian rule in Bosnia, culminating in the assassination of the Habsburg heir apparent at Sarajevo, was the spark. This local crisis rapidly engulfed all the powers of Europe through the mechanisms of the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, diplomatic arrangements meant precisely to enhance the security of their members and to deter potential aggressors. The long-term causes of the war can therefore be traced to the forces that impelled the formation of those alliances, increased tensions among the Great Powers, and made at least some European leaders desperate enough to seek their objectives even at the risk of a general war. These forces included militarism and mass mobilization, instability in domestic and international politics occasioned by rapid industrial growth, global imperialism, popular nationalism, and the rise of a social Darwinist worldview. But the question of why World War I broke out should be considered together with the questions of why peace ended and why in 1914 rather than before or after.

The Bismarckian System, 1871–90

The era of the Great Powers

The European map and world politics were less confused in the decades after 1871 than at any time before or since. The unifications of Italy and Germany removed the congeries of central European principalities that dated back to the Holy Roman Empire, while the breakup of eastern and southeastern Europe into small and quarreling states (a process that would yield the term balkanization) was not far advanced. There the old empires, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman (Turkish), still prevailed. The lesser powers of Europe, including some that once had been great, like The Netherlands, Sweden, and Spain, played little or no role in the affairs of the Great Powers unless their own interests were directly involved. Both physical size and the economies of scale important in an industrial age rendered smaller and less developed countries impotent, while the residual habits of diplomacy dating from the Congress of Vienna of 1815 made the Great Powers the sole arbiters of European politics.

In the wider world, a diplomatic system of the European variety existed nowhere else. The outcome of the U.S. Civil War and Anglo-American settlement of the Canadian border ensured that North America would not develop a multilateral balance-of-power system. South and Central America had splintered into 17 independent republics following the final retreat of Spanish rule in 1820; but the new Latin-American states were inward-looking, their centres of population and resources isolated by mountains, jungle, and sheer distance, and disputes among them were of mostly local interest. The Monroe Doctrine, promulgated by the United States and enforced by the British navy, sufficed to spare Latin America new European adventures, the only major exception—Napoleon III’s gambit in Mexico—occurring while the United States was preoccupied with civil war. When the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian tsar and Canada acquired dominion status, both in 1867, European possessions on the American mainland were reduced to three small Guianan colonies in South America and British Honduras (Belize). North Africa east of Algeria was still nominally under the aegis of the Ottoman sultan, while sub-Saharan Africa, apart from a few European ports on the coast, was terra incognita. The British had regularized their hold on the Indian subcontinent after putting down the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58, while the Chinese and Japanese empires remained xenophobic and isolationist. Thus the cabinets of the European Great Powers were at the zenith of their influence.

Europe itself, by 1871, seemed to be entering an age of political and social progress. Britain’s Second Reform Act (1867), the French Third Republic (1875), the triumph of nationalism in Italy and Germany (1871), the establishment of universal manhood suffrage in Germany (1867), equality for the Hungarians in the Habsburg monarchy (1867), emancipation of the serfs in Russia (1861), and the adoption of free trade by the major European states all seemed to justify faith in the peaceful evolution of Europe toward liberal institutions and prosperity.

International peace also seemed assured once Otto von Bismarck declared the new German Empire a satisfied power and placed his considerable talents at the service of stability. The chancellor knew Germany to be a military match for any rival but feared the possibility of a coalition. Since France would never be reconciled to her reduced status and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine imposed by the treaty ending the Franco-German War, Bismarck strove to keep France isolated. In 1873 he conjured up the ghost of monarchical solidarity and formed a Dreikaiserbund (Three Emperors’ League) with Austria-Hungary and Russia. Such a combination was always vulnerable to Austro-Russian rivalry over the Eastern Question—the problem of how to organize the feuding Balkan nationalities gradually freeing themselves from the decrepit Ottoman Empire.

After the Slavic provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina rebelled against Ottoman rule in 1875 and Russia made war on the Ottoman Empire two years later, the Dreikaiserbund collapsed. Bismarck achieved a compromise at the Congress of Berlin (1878), but Austro-Russian amity was not restored. In 1879, therefore, Bismarck concluded a permanent peacetime military alliance with Austria, whereupon the tsarist government, to court German favour, agreed to a renewal of the Dreikaiserbund in 1881. Italy, seeking aid for her Mediterranean ambitions, joined Germany and Austria-Hungary to form the Triple Alliance in 1882.

The next Balkan crisis, which erupted in Bulgaria in 1885, again tempted Russia to expand its influence to the gates of Constantinople. Bismarck dared not oppose the Russians lest he push them toward an alliance with vengeful France. So instead he played midwife to an Anglo-Austro-Italian combination called the Second Mediterranean Entente, which blocked Russian ambitions in Bulgaria while Bismarck himself concluded a Reinsurance Treaty with St. Petersburg in 1887. Once more the Eastern Question had been defused and Germany’s alliances preserved.

The nature of the German state

The generation of peace after 1871 rested on Germany’s irenic temper, served in turn by Bismarck’s statesmanship. Should that temper change, or less adept leadership succeed Bismarck, Germany had the potential to become the major disrupter of European stability. For the constitution drafted by Bismarck for the Second Reich was a dysfunctional document designed to satisfy middle-class nationalism while preserving the power of the Prussian crown and the Junker class (the Prussian landed aristocracy). Apparently a federal empire, Germany was in fact dominated by Prussia, which was larger in area and population than all the other states combined. The king of Prussia was kaiser and chief warlord of the German armies; the prime minister of Prussia was the federal chancellor, responsible, not to a majority in the Reichstag, but only to the crown. Furthermore, Prussia retained a three-class voting system weighted in favour of the wealthy. The army remained, in Prussian tradition, virtually a state within the state, loyal to the kaiser alone. In sum, Germany remained a semi-autocratic military monarchy even as it blossomed into an industrial mass society. The lack of outlets for popular dissent and reform was especially damaging given the cleavages that continued to plague Germany after unification: Protestant North versus Catholic South, agriculture versus industry, Prussia versus the other states, Junkers versus middle-class liberals, industrialists versus the (increasingly Socialist) working class. Bismarck manipulated the parties and interests as he did foreign powers. But toward the end of his tenure, even he realized that German politics might someday reduce to a choice between surrender of privilege by the old elites or a coup d’état against the liberal and Socialist groups he labeled Reichsfeinde (enemies of the Reich).

Austria-Hungary and Russia, still overwhelmingly agrarian, faced different challenges by the end of the 19th century. Most acute for Austria-Hungary was the nationality question. An heir to the universalist vision of the Holy Roman Empire, Austria-Hungary was a multinational empire composed not only of Germans and Magyars but also of (in 1870) 4,500,000 Czechs and Slovaks, 3,100,000 Ruthenes, 2,400,000 Poles, 2,900,000 Romanians, 3,000,000 Serbs and Croats, about 1,000,000 Slovenes, and 600,000 Italians. Thus, the Habsburgs faced the challenge of accommodating the nationalism of their ethnic minorities without provoking the dissolution of their empire. In British, French, and, increasingly, Russian opinion, Austria-Hungary was simply out of step with the times, moribund, and, after Turkey, the most despised of states. Bismarck, however, saw Austria-Hungary as “a European necessity”: the organizing principle in an otherwise chaotic corner of Europe, the bulwark against Russian expansion, and the keystone in the balance of power. But the progress of nationalism gradually undermined the legitimacy of the old empires. Ironically, Austria existed from 1815 to 1914 in a symbiotic relationship with her ancient enemy, the Ottoman Empire. For as the Balkan peoples gradually pulled free from Constantinople, they and their cousins across the Habsburg frontier inevitably agitated for liberation from Vienna as well.

Russia was also a multinational empire, but with the exception of the Poles her subject peoples were too few compared to Great Russians to pose a threat. Rather, Russia’s problem in the late 19th century was backwardness. Ever since the humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, tsars and their ministers had undertaken reforms to modernize agriculture, technology, and education. But the Russian autocracy, making no concession to popular sovereignty and nationality, was more threatened by social change even than the Germans. Hence the dilemma of the last tsars: They had to industrialize in order to maintain Russia as a Great Power, yet industrialization, by calling into being a large technical and managerial class and an urban proletariat, also undermined the social basis of the dynasty.

In sum, the decades after 1871 did not sustain the liberal progress of the 1860s. Resistance to political reform in the empires, a retreat from free trade after 1879, the growth of labour unions, revolutionary socialism, and social tensions attending demographic and industrial growth all affected the foreign policies of the Great Powers. It was as if, at its pinnacle of achievement, the very elements of liberal “progress”—technology, imperialism, nationalism, cultural modernism, and scientism—were inviting Europeans to steer their civilization toward calamity.

The impact of industrialism and imperialism

Patterns of population

European demographic and industrial growth in the 19th century was frantic and uneven, and both qualities contributed to growing misperceptions and paranoia in international affairs. European population grew at the rate of 1 percent per year in the century after 1815, an increase that would have been disastrous had it not been for the outlet of emigration and the new prospects of employment in the rapidly expanding cities. But the distribution of Europe’s peoples changed radically, altering the military balance among the Great Powers. In the days of Louis XIV, France was the most populous—and also the wealthiest—kingdom in Europe, and as late as 1789 it numbered 25,000,000 to Britain’s 14,500,000. When the French Revolution unleashed this national power through rationalized central administration, meritocracy, and a national draft based on patriotism, it achieved unprecedented organization of force in the form of armies of millions of men.

The French tide receded, at the cost of more than a million deaths from 1792 to 1815, never to crest again. Population growth in France, alone among the Great Powers, was almost stagnant thereafter; by 1870 her population of 36,000,000 was nearly equal to that of Austria-Hungary and already less than Germany’s 41,000,000. By 1910 Germany’s population exploded to a level two-thirds greater than France’s, while vast Russia’s population nearly doubled from 1850 to 1910 until it was more than 70 percent greater than Germany’s, although Russia’s administrative and technical backwardness offset to a degree her advantage in numbers. The demographic trends clearly traced the growing danger for France vis-à-vis Germany and the danger for Germany vis-à-vis Russia. Should Russia ever succeed in modernizing, she would become a colossus out of all proportion to the European continent.

Population pressure was a double-edged sword dangling out of reach above the heads of European governments in the 19th century. On the one hand, fertility meant a growing labour force and potentially a larger army. On the other hand, it threatened social discord if economic growth or external safety valves could not relieve the pressure. The United Kingdom adjusted through urban industrialization on the one hand and emigration to the United States and the British dominions on the other. France had no such pressure but was forced to draft a higher percentage of its manpower to fill the army ranks. Russia exported perhaps 10,000,000 excess people to its eastern and southern frontiers and several million more (mostly Poles and Jews) overseas. Germany, too, sent large numbers abroad, and no nation provided more new industrial employment from 1850 to 1910. Still, Germany’s landmass was small relative to Russia’s, her overseas possessions unsuitable to settlement, and her sense of beleaguerment acute in the face of the “Slavic threat.” Demographic trends thus helped to implant in the German population a feeling of both momentary strength and looming danger.

Industry, technology, and trade

Industrial trends magnified the demographic, for here again Germany was far and away the fastest growing economic power on the Continent. This was so not only in the basic industries of coal and iron and steel but also in the advanced fields of electricity, chemicals, and internal combustion. Germany’s swift development strained the traditional balance of power in her own society and politics. By the end of the century Germany had become a highly urbanized, industrial society, complete with large, differentiated middle and factory proletariat classes, but it was still governed largely by pre-capitalist aristocrats increasingly threatened by demands for political reform.

Industrialization also made possible the outfitting and supply of mass armies drawn from the growing populations. After 1815 the monarchies of Europe had shied away from arming the masses in the French revolutionary fashion, and the events of 1848 further justified their fear of an armed citizenry. But in the reserve system Prussia found a means of making possible a rapid mobilization of the citizenry without the risk to the regime or the elite officer corps posed by a large standing, and idle, army. (In Austria-Hungary the crown avoided disloyalty in the army by stationing soldiers of one ethnic group on the soil of another.) After Prussia’s stunning victory over France in 1871, all the Great Powers came sooner or later to adopt the German model of a mass army, supplied by a national network of railways and arms industries coordinated in turn by a general staff. The industrialization of war meant that planning and bureaucracy, technology and finance were taking the place of bold generalship and esprit in the soldier’s craft.

The final contribution to the revolution in warfare was planned research and development of weapons systems. Begun hesitantly in the French Navy in the 1850s and 1860s, command technology—the collaboration of state and industry in the invention of new armaments—was widely practiced by the turn of the century, adding to the insecurity that inevitably propelled the arms races. The demographic, technical, and managerial revolutions of the 19th century, in sum, made possible the mobilization of entire populations and economies for the waging of war.

The home of the Industrial Revolution was Great Britain, whose priority in the techniques of the factory system and of steam power was the foundation for a period of calm confidence known (with some exaggeration) as the Pax Britannica. The pound sterling became the preferred reserve currency of the world and the Bank of England the hub of international finance. British textiles, machinery, and shipping dominated the markets of Asia, South America, and much of Europe. The British Isles (again with some hyperbole) were “the workshop of the world” and in consequence from 1846 led the world in promoting free trade. British diplomacy, proudly eschewing alliances in favour of “splendid isolation,” sought to preserve a balance of power on the Continent and to protect the routes to India from Russian encroachment in the Middle East or Afghanistan.

The Pax Britannica could last only as long as Britain’s industrial hegemony. But that hegemony very naturally impelled other nations somehow to catch up, in the short term by imposing protective tariffs to shield domestic industries and in the longer term by granting government subsidies (for railroads and other national development work) and the gradual replication of British techniques. First Belgium, France, and New England, then Germany and other states after 1850 began to challenge Britain’s industrial dominance.

France (1860), Prussia (1862), and other countries then reversed earlier policies and followed the British into free trade. But in 1873 a financial panic, attributed by some to overextension in Germany after receipt of France’s billion-franc indemnity, ended the period of rapid growth. In the depression of 1873–96 (actually years of slower, uneven growth) industrial and labour leaders formed cartels, unions, and lobbies to agitate for tariffs and other forms of state intervention to stabilize the economy. Bismarck resisted until European agriculture also suffered from falling prices and lost markets after 1876 owing to the arrival in European ports of North American cereals. In 1879 the so-called alliance of rye and steel voted a German tariff on foreign manufactured goods and foodstuffs. Free trade gave way to an era of neo-mercantilism. France, Austria, Italy, and Russia followed the new (or revived) trend toward tariff protection. After 1896 the volume of world trade rose sharply again, but the sense of heightened economic competition persisted in Europe.

Social rifts also hardened during the period. Challenged by unrest and demands for reforms, Bismarck sponsored the first state social insurance plans, but he also used an attempt on the Kaiser’s life in 1878 as a pretext to outlaw the Social Democratic Party. Conservative circles, farmers as well as the wealthier classes, came gradually to distrust the loyalty of the urban working class, but industrialists shared few other interests with farmers. Other countries faced similar divisions between town and country, but urbanization was not advanced enough in Russia or France for socialism to acquire a mass following, while in Britain agriculture had long since lost out to the commercial and industrial classes, and the working class participated fully in democratic politics. The social divisions attending industrialization were especially acute in Germany because of the rapidity of her development and the survival of powerful pre-capitalist elites. Moreover, the German working class, while increasingly unionized, had few legal means of affecting state policy. All this made for a series of deadlocks in German politics that would increasingly affect foreign policy after Bismarck’s departure.

The New Imperialism

The 1870s and 1880s, therefore, witnessed a retreat from the free market and a return to state intervention in economic affairs. The foreign counterpart to this phenomenon was the New Imperialism. The Great Powers of Europe suddenly shook off almost a century of apathy toward overseas colonies and, in the space of 20 years, partitioned almost the entire uncolonized portion of the globe. Theories postulating Europe’s need to export surplus capital do not fit the facts. Only Britain and France were capital-exporting countries in 1880, and in years to come their investors preferred to export capital to other European countries (especially Russia) or the Western Hemisphere rather than to their own colonies. The British remained free-trade throughout the era of the New Imperialism, a booming home economy absorbed most German capital, and Italy and Russia were large net importers of capital. Once the scramble for colonies was complete, pressure groups did form in the various countries to argue the economic promise of imperialism, but just as often governments had to foster colonial development. In most cases, trade did not lead but followed the flag.

Why, then, was the flag planted in the first place? Sometimes it was to protect economic interests, as when the British occupied Egypt in 1882, but more often it was for strategic reasons or in pursuit of national prestige. One necessary condition for the New Imperialism, often overlooked, is technological. Prior to the 1870s Europeans could overawe native peoples along the coasts of Africa and Asia but lacked the firepower, mobility, and communications that would have been needed to pacify the interior. (India was the exception, where the British East India Company exploited an anarchic situation and allied itself with selected native rulers against others.) The tsetse fly and the Anopheles mosquito—bearers of sleeping sickness and malaria—were the ultimate defenders of African and Asian jungles. The correlation of forces between Europe and the colonizable world shifted, however, with the invention of shallow-draft riverboats, the steamship and telegraph, the repeater rifle and Maxim gun, and the discovery (in India) that quinine is an effective prophylactic against malaria. By 1880 small groups of European regulars, armed with modern weapons and exercising fire discipline, could overwhelm many times their number of native troops.

The scramble for Africa should be dated, not from 1882, when the British occupied Egypt, but from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The strategic importance of that waterway cannot be overstated. It was the gateway to India and East Asia and hence a vital interest nonpareil for the British Empire. When the Khedive of Egypt defaulted on loans owed to France and Britain, and a nationalist uprising ensued—the first such Arab rebellion against the Western presence—the French backed away from military occupation, although with Bismarck’s encouragement and moral support they occupied Tunis in 1881, expanding their North African presence from Algeria. Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, otherwise an adamant anticolonialist, then established a British protectorate in Egypt. When the French reacted bitterly, Bismarck further encouraged French colonial expansion in hopes of distracting them from Europe, and he then took his own country into the fray by claiming four large segments of Africa for Germany in 1884. In that year the King of the Belgians cast his eye on the entire Congo Basin. The Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–85 was called to settle a variety of disputes involved in European colonial occupation, and over the next 10 years all the Great Powers of Europe save Austria and Russia staked out colonies and protectorates on the African continent. But whatever the ambitions and rivalries of military adventurers, explorers, and private empire-builders on the scene, the cabinets of Europe came to agreements on colonial boundaries with surprising neighbourliness. Colonial wars did ensue after 1894, but never between two European colonial powers.

It has been suggested that imperial rivalries were a long-range cause of World War I. It has also been said that they were a safety valve, drawing off European energies that might otherwise have erupted in war much sooner. But the links between imperialism and the war are more subtle. The heyday of the New Imperialism, especially after 1894, created a tacit understanding in the European elites and the broad literate classes that the days of the old European balance of power were over, that a new world order was dawning, and that any nation left behind in the pursuit of world power would sink into obscurity. This intuition must surely have fed a growing sense of desperation among Germans, and one of paranoia among Britons, about trends in global politics. A second point, subtler still, is that the New Imperialism, while it did not directly provoke World War I, did occasion a transformation of alliances that proved dangerous beyond reckoning once the Great Powers turned their attention back to Europe.

Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, and within a decade popularizers had applied—or misapplied—his theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest to contemporary politics and economics. This pseudoscientific social Darwinism appealed to educated Europeans already demoralized by a century of higher criticism of religious scripture and conscious of the competitiveness of their own daily lives in that age of freewheeling industrial capitalism. By the 1870s books appeared explaining the outcome of the Franco-German War, for instance, with reference to the “vitality” of the Germanic peoples by comparison to the “exhausted” Latins. Pan-Slavic literature extolled the youthful vigour of that race, of whom Russia was seen as the natural leader. A belief in the natural affinity and superiority of Nordic peoples sustained Joseph Chamberlain’s conviction that an Anglo-American–German alliance should govern the world in the 20th century. Vulgar anthropology explained the relative merits of human races on the basis of physiognomy and brain size, a “scientific” approach to world politics occasioned by the increasing contact of Europeans with Asians and Africans. Racialist rhetoric became common currency, as when the Kaiser referred to Asia’s growing population as “the yellow peril” and spoke of the next war as a “death struggle between the Teutons and Slavs.” Poets and philosophers idealized combat as the process by which nature weeds out the weak and improves the human race.

By 1914, therefore, the political and moral restraints on war that had arisen after 1789–1815 were significantly weakened. The old conservative notion that established governments had a heavy stake in peace lest revolution engulf them, and the old liberal notion that national unity, democracy, and free trade would spread harmony, were all but dead. The historian cannot judge how much social Darwinism influenced specific policy decisions, but a mood of fatalism and bellicosity surely eroded the collective will to peace.

Completing the alliance systems, 1890–1907

Germany’s new course

In 1890 the young Kaiser William II dismissed the aged Bismarck and proclaimed a new course for Germany. An intelligent but unstable man who compensated for a withered arm with military demeanour and intemperate remarks, William felt keenly his realm’s lack of prestige in comparison with the British Empire. William rejected Bismarck’s emphasis on security in Europe in favour of a flamboyant Weltpolitik (world policy) aimed at making Germany’s presence abroad commensurate with her new industrial might. Where Bismarck considered colonies a dangerous luxury given Germany’s geographic position, the Kaiser thought them indispensable for Germany’s future. Where Bismarck sought alliances to avoid the risk of war on two fronts, the Kaiser (and his chief foreign policy official, Baron von Holstein) believed Germany should capitalize on the colonial quarrels among France, Britain, and Russia. Where Bismarck had outlawed the Socialists and feared for the old order in Germany, the Kaiser permitted the anti-Socialist laws to lapse and believed he could win over the working class through prosperity, social policy, and national glory.

The consequences of the new course were immediate and damaging. In 1890 Holstein gratuitously dropped Bismarck’s Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, prompting St. Petersburg to overcome its antipathy to republican France and conclude a military alliance in 1894. The tie was sealed with a golden braid: Between 1894 and 1914 the Russians floated billions of francs in loans on the Paris market to finance factory building, arms programs, and military railroads to the German border. Russia hoped mainly for French support in its colonial disputes with the British Empire and even went so far as to agree with Austria-Hungary in 1897 to hold the question of the Balkans in abeyance for 10 years, thereby freeing resources for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the penetration of northern China. The German foreign office thus did not take alarm at the alliance Bismarck had struggled so long to prevent.

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 signaled the arrival of Japan on the world stage. Having seen their nation forcibly opened to foreign influence by Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853, the Japanese determined not to suffer China’s fate as a hapless object of Western incursion. Once the Meiji Restoration established strong central government beginning in 1868, Japan became the first non-Western state to launch a crash program of industrialization. By the 1890s its modern army and navy permitted Japan to take its place beside the Europeans as an imperial power. In the war with China, Japan won control of Korea, Taiwan, Port Arthur on the Manchurian mainland, and other advantages. European intervention scaled back these gains, but a scramble for concessions in China eventuated. Russia won concessions in Manchuria, the French in South China, the Germans at Chiao-chou Bay on the Shantung Peninsula. In 1898 the United States annexed the Philippine Islands after the Spanish-American War. The loser in the scramble, besides China, was Britain, which had previously enjoyed a near monopoly in the China trade.

The threats to Britain’s empire

British fortunes suffered elsewhere during this high tide of imperialism from 1897 to 1907. The South African, or Boer, War (1899–1902) against the independent Boer republics of the South African interior proved longer and costlier than the British expected, and although they won the “dirty little war” the British saw their world position erode. Germany partitioned Samoa with the United States, and the latter annexed the Hawaiian Islands. Germany abandoned her long apathy toward the Middle East and won a concession for Turkish railroads. The Kaiser, influenced by his envy of Britain, his own fondness for seafaring, and the worldwide impact of The Influence of Sea Power upon History by the American naval scholar Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, determined that Weltpolitik was impossible without a great High Seas Fleet. The prospect of a large German navy—next to the growing fleets of France, Russia, Japan, and the United States—meant that Britain would no longer rule the waves alone.

The dawn of the 20th century was thus a time of anxiety for the British Empire as well. Challenged for the first time by the commercial, naval, and colonial might of many other industrializing nations, the British reconsidered the wisdom of splendid isolation. To be sure, in the Fashoda Incident of 1898 Britain succeeded in forcing France to retreat from the upper reaches of the Nile. But how much longer could Britain defend her empire alone? Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain began at once to sound out Berlin on the prospect of global collaboration. A British demarche was precisely what the Germans had been expecting, but three attempts to reach an Anglo-German understanding, between 1898 and 1901, led to naught. In retrospect, it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. The German foreign minister and, from 1900, chancellor, Bernhard, Fürst von Bülow, shared the Kaiser’s and Holstein’s ambitions for world power. If, as Germany’s neo-Rankean historians proclaimed, the old European balance of power was giving way to a new world balance, then the future would surely belong to the Anglo-Saxons (British Empire and America) and Slavs (Russian Empire) unless Germany were able to achieve its own place in the sun. Bülow agreed that “our future lies on the water.” German and British interests were simply irreconcilable. What Britain sought was German help in reducing Franco-Russian pressure on the British Empire and defending the balance of power. What Germany sought was British neutrality or cooperation while Germany expanded its own power in the world. Bülow still believed in Holstein’s “free hand” policy of playing the other powers off against each other and accordingly placed a high price on German support and invited Britain to join the Triple Alliance as a full military partner. Understandably, the British declined to underwrite Germany’s continental security.

The failure of the Anglo-German talks condemned both powers to dangerous competition. The German navy could never hope to equal the British and would only ensure British hostility. But equality was not necessary, said Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. All Germany needed was a “risk fleet” large enough to deter the British, who would not dare alienate Germany and thus lose their only potential ally in the continuing rivalry with France and Russia. In this way Germany could extract concessions from London without alliance or war. What the Germans failed to consider was that Britain might someday come to terms with its other antagonists.

This was precisely what Britain did. The Edwardian era (1901–10) was one of intense concern over the decline of Britain’s naval and commercial dominance. German firms shouldered aside the British in numerous markets (even though they remained each other’s best trading partners). The new German navy menaced Britain in her home waters. The French and Russian fleets, not to mention the Japanese, outnumbered the Royal Navy’s Asian squadron. The French, Italian, and potential Russian presence in the Mediterranean threatened the British lifeline to India. Soon the Panama Canal would enable the United States to deploy a two-ocean navy. Accordingly, the foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, set about reducing the number of Britain’s potential opponents. First, he cemented friendly relations with the United States in the Hay–Pauncefote Treaty (1901). He then shocked the world by concluding a military alliance with Japan, thereby securing British interests in East Asia and allowing the empire to concentrate its regional forces on India. But when growing tension between Russia and Japan over Manchuria appeared likely to erupt in war in 1904, France (Russia’s ally) and Britain (now Japan’s ally) faced a quandary. To prevent being dragged into the conflict, the French and British shucked off their ancient rivalry and concluded an Entente Cordiale whereby France gave up opposition to British rule in Egypt, and Britain recognized French rights in Morocco. Though strictly a colonial arrangement, it marked another step away from isolation for both Britain and France and another step toward it for the restless and frustrated Germans.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 was an ominous turning point. Contrary to all expectations, Japan triumphed on land and sea, and Russia stumbled into the Revolution of 1905. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the war, and the Tsar quelled the revolutionary flames with promises of parliamentary government, but the war resonated in world diplomacy. Japan established itself as the leading Asian power. The example of an Oriental nation rising up to defeat a European Great Power emboldened Chinese, Indians, and Arabs to look forward to a day when they might expel the imperialists from their midst. And tsarist Russia, its Asian adventure a shambles, looked once again to the Balkans as a field for expansion, setting the stage for World War I.

The Triple Entente

In 1905 the Germans seized on Russia’s temporary troubles to pressure France in Morocco. Bülow believed he had much to gain—at best he might force a breakup of the Anglo-French entente, at worst he might provoke a French retreat and secure German rights in Morocco. But at the Algeciras Conference in 1906, called to settle the Morocco dispute, only Austria-Hungary supported the German position. Far from breaking the Entente Cordiale, the affair prompted the British to begin secret staff talks with the French military. The United States, Russia, and even Italy, Germany’s erstwhile partner in the Triple Alliance, took France’s side. For some years Italian ambitions in the Mediterranean had been thwarted, and the attempt to conquer Abyssinia in 1896 had failed. The German alliance seemed to offer little, while Rome’s other foreign objective, the Italian irredenta in the Tirol and Dalmatia, was aimed at Austria-Hungary. So in 1900 Italy concluded a secret agreement pledging support for France in Morocco in return for French support of Italy in Libya. The Russo-Japanese War also strengthened ties between France and Russia as French loans again rebuilt Russia’s shattered armed forces. Finally, and most critically, the defeated Russians and worried British were now willing to put to rest their old rivalry in Central Asia. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 made a neutral buffer of Tibet, recognized Britain’s interest in Afghanistan, and partitioned Persia into spheres of influence. Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey also hinted at the possibility of British support for Russian policy in the Balkans, reversing a century-old tradition.

The heyday of European imperialism thus called into existence a second alliance system, the Triple Entente of France, Britain, and Russia. It was not originally conceived as a balance to German power, but that was its effect, especially in light of the escalating naval race. In 1906 the Royal Navy under the reformer Sir John Fisher launched HMS Dreadnought, a battleship whose size, armour, speed, and gunnery rendered all existing warships obsolete. The German government responded in kind, even enlarging the Kiel Canal at great expense to accommodate the larger ships. What were the British, dependent on imports by sea for seven-eighths of their raw materials and over half their foodstuffs, to make of German behaviour? In a famous Foreign Office memo of January 1907, Senior Clerk Sir Eyre Crowe surmised that Weltpolitik was either a conscious bid for hegemony or a “vague, confused, and unpractical statesmanship not realizing its own drift.” As Ambassador Sir Francis Bertie put it, “The Germans aim to push us into the water and steal our clothes.”

For France the Triple Entente was primarily a continental security apparatus. For Russia it was a means of reducing points of conflict so that the antiquated tsarist system could buy time to catch up technologically with the West. For Britain the ententes, the Japanese alliance, and the “special relationship” with the United States were diplomatic props for an empire beyond Britain’s capacity to defend alone. The three powers’ interests by no means coincided—disputes over Persia alone might have smashed Anglo-Russian unity if the war had not intervened. But to the Germans, the Triple Entente looked suspiciously like encirclement designed to frustrate their rightful claims to world power and prestige. German attempts to break the encirclement, however, would only alarm the entente powers and cause them to draw the loose strings into a knot. That in turn tempted German leaders, fearful that time was against them, to cut the Gordian knot with the sword. For after 1907 the focus of diplomacy shifted back to the Balkans, with European cabinets unaware, until it was too late, that alliances made with the wide world in mind had dangerously limited their freedom of action in Europe.

Militarism and pacifism before 1914

Anxiety and the arms race

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Europe before 1914 succumbed to hubris. The conventional images of “armed camps,” “a powder-keg,” or “saber rattling” almost trivialize a civilization that combined within itself immense pride in its newly expanding power and almost apocalyptic insecurity about the future. Europe bestrode the world, and yet Lord Curzon could remark, “We can hardly take up our morning newspaper without reading of the physical and moral decline of the race,” and the German chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, could say that if Germany backed down again on Morocco, “I shall despair of the future of the German Empire.” France’s stagnant population and weak industry made her statesmen frantic for security, Austrian leaders were filled with foreboding about their increasingly disaffected nationalities, and the tsarist regime, with the most justification, sensed doom.

Whether from ambition or insecurity, the Great Powers armed as never before in peacetime, with military expenditures reaching 5 to 6 percent of national income. Military conscription and reserve systems made available a significant percentage of the adult male population, and the impulse to create large standing armies was strengthened by the widespread belief that firepower and financial limitations would make the next war short and violent. Simple reaction also played a large role. Fear of the “Russian steamroller” was sufficient to expand Germany’s service law; a larger German army provoked the outmanned French into an extension of national service to three years. Only Britain did without a large conscripted army, but her naval needs were proportionally more expensive.

In an age of heavy, rapid-fire artillery, infantry rifles, and railroads, but not yet including motor transport, tanks, or airplanes, a premium was placed by military staffs on mass, supply, and prior planning. European commanders assumed that in a continental war the opening frontier battles would be decisive, hence the need to mobilize the maximum number of men and move them at maximum speed to the border. The meticulous and rigid advance planning that this strategy required placed inordinate pressure on the diplomats in a crisis. Politicians might hold back their army in hopes of saving the peace only at the risk of losing the war should diplomacy fail. What was more, all the continental powers embraced offensive strategies. The French general staff’s “cult of attack” assumed that élan could carry the day against superior German numbers. Its Plan XVII called for an immediate assault on Lorraine. The Germans’ Schlieffen Plan addressed the problem of war on two fronts by throwing almost the entire German army into a sweeping offensive through neutral Belgium to capture Paris and the French army in a gigantic envelope. Troops could then be transported east to meet the slower-moving Russian army. Worked out down to the last railroad switch and passenger car, the Schlieffen Plan was an apotheosis of the industrial age: a mechanical, almost mathematical perfection that wholly ignored political factors. None of the general staffs anticipated what the war would actually be like. Had they glimpsed the horrific stalemate in the trenches, surely neither they nor the politicians would have run the risks they did in 1914.

Above the mass infantry armies of the early 20th century stood the officer corps, the general staffs, and at the pinnacle the supreme war lords: kaiser, emperor, tsar, and king, all of whom adopted military uniforms as their standard dress in these years. The army was a natural refuge for the central and eastern European aristocracies, the chivalric code of arms sustaining almost the only public service to which they could still reasonably lay claim. Even in republican France a nationalist revival after 1912 excited public morale, inspired the military buildup, and both fueled and cloaked a revanche aimed at recovery of the provinces lost 40 years before. Popular European literature poured forth best-sellers depicting the next war, and mass-circulation newspapers incited even the working classes with news of imperial adventures or the latest slight by the adversary.

The peace movements

Various peace movements sprang up to counter the spirit of militarism before 1914. Most numerous and disturbing to those responsible for national defense were the Socialists. The Second International took the Marxist view of imperialism and militarism as creatures of capitalist competition and loudly warned that if the bosses provoked a war, the working classes would refuse to take part. Jean Jaurès defined the proletariat as “masses of men who collectively love peace and hate war.” The 1912 Basel Conference declared the proletariat “the herald of world peace” and proclaimed “war on war.” Sober observers like George Bernard Shaw and Max Weber doubted that any putative sense of solidarity among workers would outweigh their nationalism, but the French government kept a blacklist of agitators who might try to subvert mobilization. Some of Germany’s leaders imagined that war might provide the opportunity to crush socialism by appeals to patriotism or martial law.

A liberal peace movement with a middle-class constituency flourished around the turn of the century. As many as 425 peace organizations are estimated to have existed in 1900, fully half of them in Scandinavia and most others in Germany, Britain, and the United States. Their greatest achievements were the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907, at which the powers agreed to ban certain inhumane weapons but made no progress toward general disarmament. The liberal peace movement also foundered on internal contradictions. To outlaw war was to endorse the international status quo, yet liberals always stood ready to excuse wars that could claim progressive ends. They had tolerated the wars of Italian and German unification, and they would tolerate the Balkan Wars against the Ottoman Empire in 1912–13 and the great war in 1914. Another solution for many peace advocates was to transcend the nation-state. Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (1910) argued that it already had been transcended: that interdependence among nations made war illogical and counterproductive. To Marxists this image of capitalism was ludicrous; to Weber or Joseph Schumpeter, it was correct, but beside the point. Blood was thicker than class, or money; politics dominated economics; and irrationality, reason.

The one European statesman most sympathetic to the peace movements was, not surprisingly, Britain’s Liberal foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. Citing the waste, social discord, and international tension caused by the naval arms race, he made several overtures to Germany in hopes of ending it. When these failed, Britain had little choice but to race more quickly than the Germans. Even radical Liberals like David Lloyd George had to admit that however much they might deplore arms races in the abstract, all that was liberal and good in the world depended on the security of Britain and its control of its seas.

The Balkan crises and the outbreak of war, 1907–14

Growing tensions and German isolation

In the end, war did not come over the naval race, or commercial competition, or imperialism. Nor was it sparked by the institutional violence of the armed states, but by underground terrorism in the name of an oppressed people. Nor did it come over the ambitions of Great Powers to become greater, but over the fear of one Great Power that unless it took vigorous action it might cease to exist altogether. It began in the Balkans.

In 1897 Austria-Hungary and Russia had agreed to put their dispute over the Balkans on ice. When the agreement ran out in 1907, the Ottoman Empire still ruled Macedonia, ringed by Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria. But everything else had changed. For now Austria-Hungary’s only reliable ally was Germany, whose Weltpolitik had led it to join the competition for influence at Constantinople. Russia was looking again at the Balkans for foreign policy advantage and enjoying, for the first time, a measure of British tolerance. In Serbia, the state most threatening to Vienna because of its ethnic tie to the Serbs and Croats inside the Dual Monarchy, a fundamental political shift had occurred. In previous years Vienna had neutralized Serbia by bribing the ruling Obrenović dynasty, but in 1903 the rival Karageorgević clan seized control in Belgrade in a bloody coup d’état and shifted to a violently anti-Austrian policy. Finally, in 1908, a cabal of officers known as the Young Turks staged the first modernizing revolution in the Muslim world and tried to force the Sultan to adopt liberal reforms. In particular the Young Turks called for parliamentary elections, thereby placing in doubt the status of Bosnia and Hercegovina, provinces still under Ottoman sovereignty but administered by Austria-Hungary since 1878. The Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Aloys Aehrenthal, proposed to settle the Bosnian issue and to crush Serbian ambitions once and for all by annexing the provinces. To this purpose he teased the Russian foreign minister, Aleksandr Petrovich Izvolsky, with talk of a quid pro quo: Russia’s acquiescence in annexation in return for Austria-Hungary’s in the opening of the Dardanelles to Russian warships. When instead Aehrenthal acted unilaterally, and Izvolsky’s straits proposal was rejected, the Russians felt betrayed. Their response was to increase aid and comfort to their client Serbia and to determine never again to back down in the Balkans.

German politics were also approaching a breaking point. Chancellor von Bülow had governed, with the support of Tirpitz, the Kaiser, and the moderate and conservative parties in the Reichstag, on the basis of a grand compromise of which the navy was the linchpin. Agrarian interests continued to demand protection against foreign foodstuffs, but the tariffs imposed to that end harmed German industrial exports. A large armaments program, especially naval, compensated heavy industry for lost foreign markets. The losers in the tariffs-plus-navy-legislation arrangement were consumers, who were taxed for the defense program after they had paid higher prices for bread. Popular resentment tended to increase the Socialist vote, and the other parties could command a majority only by banding together.

Soon, however, the expensive dreadnought race provoked a fiscal crisis that cracked the Bülow bloc and, in 1909, elevated Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg to the chancellorship. He faced the choice of ending the naval race and moderating Germany’s Weltpolitik, or making democratic concessions to the left, or somehow rebuilding the coalition of conservative agrarians and industrialists in the teeth of Socialist opposition. Bethmann showed signs of preferring the first course but was undercut by the pressure of industry, Tirpitz’ naval propaganda, and the Kaiser’s bravado, symbolized by a damaging Daily Telegraph interview (1908) in which he made inflammatory remarks about the British. When in 1912 Lord Haldane was dispatched to Berlin to discuss a suspension of the naval arms race, the Kaiser spoiled chances for an accord by introducing a new naval bill two days before his arrival. The British then accelerated their own dreadnought construction. By now the failure of German policy was apparent. Clearly the British would not permit Germany to challenge their sea power, while the German army agreed in 1912 to tolerate further naval expansion only if the army were granted a sharp increase in funding as well. In the 1912 elections the Social Democrats won 110 seats and became the largest party in the Reichstag.

Domestic and foreign stalemate obsessed Germany’s political and military leadership. Reform at home meant an end to the privileged positions of the various elites; retreat abroad meant the end of Germany’s dreams of world power. A bold stroke, even at the risk of war, seemed the only way out of the double impasse. In 1911 Foreign Minister Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter tried to force the issue in Morocco, where the French clearly aimed at a formal protectorate in defiance of the Algeciras accords. Germany sent the gunboat Panther to the Moroccan port of Agadir in defense of “German interests” there. Britain again stood with France, however, and Kiderlen-Wächter acquiesced in a French Morocco in exchange for portions of French colonies in Central Africa. In France this accommodation of Germany brought down the government of Premier Joseph Caillaux, who was succeeded by Raymond Poincaré, a determined nationalist and advocate of military preparedness who quickly secured passage of an expansion of the standing army. In Britain, Winston Churchill, then first lord of the Admiralty, withdrew his fleet from the Mediterranean to home waters, making mandatory even closer military coordination with France.

This Second Moroccan Crisis confirmed Germany’s isolation, while the British, French, and Russian military buildups meant that time was on the side of the entente. Moltke had already raised the notion of preventive war, and in the Kaiser’s war council of December 1912 he blustered, “War, the sooner the better.” To be sure, jingoism of this sort could be found in every Great Power on the eve of the war, but only the leaders in Berlin—and soon Vienna—were seriously coming to view war not as simply a possibility but as a necessity.

The final prewar assault on the Ottoman Empire also began in 1911. Italy cashed in her bargain with France over Libya by declaring war on Turkey and sending a naval squadron as far as the Dardanelles. Simultaneously, Russian ministers in the Balkans brought about an alliance between the bitter rivals Serbia and Bulgaria in preparation for a final strike against Ottoman-controlled Europe. The First Balkan War erupted in October 1912, when Montenegro declared war on Turkey, followed quickly by Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece. The Young Turks ended the conflict with Italy, ceding Libya, but failed to contain the Balkan armies. In May 1913 the Great Powers imposed a settlement; Macedonia was partitioned among the Balkan states, Crete was granted to Greece, and Albania was given its independence. Landlocked Serbia, however, bid for additional territory in Macedonia, and Bulgaria replied with an attack on Serbia and Greece, thus beginning the Second Balkan War in June 1913. In the peace that followed in August, Bulgaria lost most of her stake in the former Turkish lands plus much of the southern Dobruja region to Romania. Serbia, however, doubled its territory and, flushed with victory, turned its sights on the Austro-Hungarian provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina.

The final crisis

How might the Habsburg Empire survive the rise of particularist nationalism in eastern Europe? Austrian statesmen had debated the question for 50 years, and the best answer seemed to be some form of federalism permitting political autonomy to the nationalities. Reforms of this nature had always been vetoed by the Hungarians, who stood to lose their own position vis-à-vis the German-Austrians and the minorities in their half of the empire. Conrad Franz, Graf von Hötzendorf, chief of the general staff, favoured preventive war against Serbia to stifle nationalist agitation for good and reinforce the old order. Archduke Francis Ferdinand wrote, however, “I live and shall die for federalism; it is the sole salvation for the monarchy, if anything can save it.” Out of favour with the court for his morganatic marriage and resented by the Hungarians and by conservatives, the heir apparent was also feared by Slavic radicals as the one man who might really pacify the nationalities and so frustrate their dreams of a Greater Serbia. Hence the archduke was a marked man among the secret societies that sprang up to liberate Bosnia. Such is the logic of terrorism: Its greatest enemies are the peacemakers.

The National Defense (Narodna Odbrana) was formed in Serbia in 1908 to carry on pro-Serbian and anti-Austrian agitation across the border. Its nonviolent methods were deemed insufficient by others, who in 1911 formed the secret society Union or Death (Ujedinjenje ili Smrt), also known as the Black Hand, led by the head of Serbian military intelligence, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević. The latter had been involved in the 1903 assassinations of the Obrenović family and favoured terrorist action over intellectual propaganda. With his support, if not on his direct orders, a band of youthful romantics conspired to assassinate Francis Ferdinand during his state visit to Sarajevo. On June 28, 1914, which happened to be the Serbian national holiday, the Archduke and his wife rode in an open car through the streets of the Bosnian capital. A bomb was thrown but missed. The Archduke completed his official duties, whereupon the governor of Bosnia suggested they deviate from the planned route on the return trip for safety’s sake. But the lead driver in the procession took a wrong turn, the cars stopped momentarily, and at that moment the 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip fired his revolver, killing both royal passengers.

Reaction in Vienna, and Europe generally, was surprisingly restrained. No one imagined that the outrage had more than local importance, much less that Bismarck’s prophecy about “some damned fool thing in the Balkans” starting the next war was about to be fulfilled. Conrad von Hötzendorf saw the deed as pretext for his preventive war against Serbia, but the aged emperor Francis Joseph preferred to await an inquiry to determine the extent of Serbian complicity. Germany, on the other hand, pressed for a firm riposte and in the Kaiser’s famous “blank check” memo promised to support whatever action Austria might take against Serbia. The Germans expected Russia to back down, since its military reforms would not be complete for several years, but even if Russia came to Serbia’s aid, the German high command was confident of victory. Bethmann was less so. A move against Serbia could lead to a world war, he warned on July 7. Yet Bethmann went along in the vain hope of localizing the conflict.

Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold, Graf von Berchtold, now advocated a firm policy toward Serbia lest Austria’s prestige deteriorate further and the Balkan states unite behind Russia. Gróf Tisza, the prime minister of Hungary, insisted, however, that diplomatic and legal justifications precede such a clash of arms: Austria must first present a list of demands for redress. Should Serbia accept, the empire would win a “brilliant diplomatic success”; should Serbia refuse, war could be waged with Austria-Hungary posing as the aggrieved party. In no case was Austria to annex any Serbian territory.

The Russian response to any Austrian initiative would be critical, and by chance the president and prime minister of France, Poincaré and René Viviani, were paying a state visit to St. Petersburg in July. Strangely, there is no record of the Franco-Russian conversations, but it is known that Poincaré assured the Russians that France would stand by her alliance commitments. On July 23, just after the French leaders left for home, Vienna presented its ultimatum to Belgrade, demanding dissolution of the secret societies, cessation of anti-Austrian propaganda, and Austrian participation in the investigation of the Sarajevo crime. Serbia was given 48 hours to respond.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Dmitriyevich Sazonov, erupted at news of the ultimatum and insisted on military measures. The French ambassador, Maurice-Georges Paléologue, with or without instructions from his departed chiefs, encouraged Sazonov. For if Austria’s prestige—and very future—were at stake in the Balkans, so too were tsarist Russia’s, for which the Balkans was the only region left in which to demonstrate its vitality. But now Germany was competing for influence over the Young Turks, courting Bulgaria, and plotting to smash Serbia. The German slogan “From Berlin to Baghdad,” referring originally only to railroads, took on ominous new political meaning. On July 25 the Russian Council of Ministers decided that if Austrian forces entered Serbia, Russia would mobilize its army. This precipitous, indeed anticipatory, decision reflected Russia’s size and the inadequacy of its rail network. Sazonov seems to have considered mobilization a political threat, but given the mechanistic timetables that were integral to the planning of all the European general staffs, it could only provoke countermobilizations and an inexorable drift into war.

On July 25 Serbia accepted all the Austro-Hungarian conditions save those two that directly compromised its sovereignty. Two days later Berchtold persuaded Francis Joseph to initiate war. At the same moment the Kaiser, returning from a yachting expedition, tried belatedly to restrain Vienna. On July 28 Austria declared war and bombarded Belgrade; on the same day the Tsar approved the mobilization of the Russian army against Austria, and alarms went off all over Europe. Sir Edward Grey, Kaiser William, and the Italian government all proposed negotiations, with the Austrians to occupy Belgrade as a pledge of Serbian compliance. The German ambassador in St. Petersburg assured the Russians that Austria meant to annex no Serbian territory. But it was too little and far too late. In St. Petersburg the generals protested that partial mobilization would disrupt their contingency plans: How could Russia prepare to fight Austria-Hungary while leaving naked her border with Austria’s ally Germany? The weak and vacillating Tsar Nicholas II was persuaded, and on the afternoon of July 30 he authorized general mobilization of the Russian army.

The previous day, Poincaré and Viviani had finally arrived back in Paris, where they were met with patriotic crowds and generals anxious for military precautions. In Berlin, anti-Russian demonstrations and equally anxious generals called for immediate action. On the 31st, when all the other powers had begun preparations of some sort, and even the British had put the fleet to sea (thanks to Winston Churchill’s foresight), Germany delivered ultimatums to Russia, demanding an end to mobilization, and to France, demanding neutrality in case of war in the east. But Russia and France could scarcely accede without abandoning the Balkans, each other, and their own security. When the ultimatums expired, the Schlieffen Plan was put into effect. Germany declared war against Russia on August 1 and against France on August 3 and demanded safe passage for its troops through Belgium. Refused again, Germany invaded Belgium in force.

On August 3, Italy took refuge in the fact that this was not a defensive war on Austria-Hungary’s part and declared its neutrality. That left only Britain, faced with the choice of joining its entente partners in war or standing aloof and risking German domination of the Continent. Britain had little interest in the Serbian affair, and the kingdom was torn by the Irish question. The Cabinet was in doubt as late as August 2. But the prospect of the German fleet in the English Channel and German armies on the Belgian littoral settled the issue. On the 3rd Britain demanded that Germany evacuate Belgium, and Grey won over Parliament with appeals to British interests and international law. On August 4, Britain declared war on Germany.

The war-guilt question

The search for causes

Debate over the origins of World War I was from the start partisan and moral in tone. Each of the belligerents published documentary collections selected to shift the blame and prove that it was fighting in self-defense. Serbia was defending itself against Austrian aggression. Austria-Hungary was defending its very existence against terror plotted on foreign soil. Russia was defending Serbia and the Slavic cause against German imperialism. Germany was defending its lone reliable ally from attack and itself from entente encirclement. France, with most justification, was defending itself against unprovoked German attack. And Britain was fighting in defense of Belgium, international law, and the balance of power.

In the Treaty of Versailles (1919) the victorious coalition justified its peace terms by forcing Germany and its allies to acknowledge guilt for the war. This tactic was historically dubious and politically disastrous, but it stemmed from the liberal conviction, as old as the Enlightenment, that peace was normal and war an aberration or crime for which clear responsibility—guilt—could be established. Almost at once, revisionist historians examined the thousands of documents that governments made available after 1920 and challenged the Versailles verdict. Yes, the German government had issued the risky “blank check” and urged Vienna on an aggressive course. It had swept aside all proposals for mediation until events had gained irreversible momentum. It had, finally, surrendered its authority to a military plan that ensured the war could not be localized. Indeed, the whole course of German foreign policy since 1890 had been restless and counter-productive, calling into existence the very ring of enemies it then took extreme risks to break. But, on the other hand, Russia’s hasty mobilization expanded the crisis beyond the Balkans, initiated a round of military moves, and contributed to German panic. Given the military realities of the age, Sazonov’s notion of Russian mobilization as a mere “application of pressure” was either disingenuous or foolish. France could be faulted for not restraining Russia and for issuing its own “blank check.” Even the British might have done more to preserve peace, either through more vigorous mediation or by making clear that they would not remain neutral in a continental war, thus deterring the Germans. Finally, what of the states at the heart of the crisis? Surely Belgrade’s use of political terrorism in the name of Greater Serbia, and Austria-Hungary’s determination to crush its tormentors, provoked the crisis in the first place. By the 1930s moderate historians had concluded, with Lloyd George, that no one country was to blame for the war: “We all stumbled into it.”

The failure of documentary research to settle the war-guilt question led other historians to look behind the July 1914 crisis for long-range causes of the war. Surely, they reasoned, such profound events must have had profound origins. As early as 1928 the American Sidney B. Fay concluded that none of the European leaders had wanted a great war and identified as its deeper causes the alliance systems, militarism, imperialism, nationalism, and the newspaper press. (Marxists, of course, from the publication of Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916, held finance capitalism to be accountable for the war.) In this view the polarization of Europe into alliance systems had made “chain-reaction” escalation of a local imbroglio almost predictable. Militarism and imperialism had fed tensions and appetites among the Great Powers, while nationalism and sensationalist journalism had stoked popular resentments. How else could one explain the universal enthusiasm with which soldiers and civilians alike greeted the outbreak of war? Such evenhanded sentiments, along with the abstraction of the terms of analysis that exculpated individuals while blaming the system, were both appealing and prescriptive. In the 1930s British statesmen in particular would strive to learn the lessons of 1914 and so prevent another war. As another generation’s hindsight would reveal, the lessons did not apply to the new situation.

After World War II and the Cold War had left the issues of 1914 passé, a committee of French and German historians agreed that World War I was an unwilled disaster for which all countries shared blame. Only a few years later, however, in 1961, that consensus shattered. The German historian Fritz Fischer published a massive study of German war aims during 1914–18 and held that Germany’s government, social elites, and even broad masses had consciously pursued a breakthrough to world power in the years before World War I and that the German government, fully aware of the risks of world war and of British belligerency, had deliberately provoked the 1914 crisis. Fischer’s thesis sparked bitter debate and a rash of new interpretations of World War I. Leftist historians made connections between Fischer’s evidence and that cited 30 years before by Eckhart Kehr, who had traced the social origins of the naval program to the cleavages in German society and the stalemate in the Reichstag. Other historians saw links to the Bismarckian technique of using foreign policy excursions to stifle domestic reform, a technique dubbed “social imperialism.” Germany’s rulers, it appeared, had resolved before 1914 to overthrow the world order in hopes of preserving the domestic order.

Traditionalist critics of Fischer pointed to the universality of imperialistic, social Darwinist, and militaristic behaviour on the eve of the war. The Kaiser, in his most nationalistic moods, only spoke and acted like many others in all the Great Powers. Did not Sazonov and the Russian generals, in their unrecorded moments, yearn to erase the humiliation of 1905 and conquer the Dardanelles, or Poincaré and General J.-J.-C. Joffre wonder excitedly if the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine were finally at hand, or the Primrose and Navy leagues thrill to the prospect of a Nelsonian clash of dreadnoughts? Germans were not the only people who grew weary of peace or harboured grandiose visions of empire. To this universalist view leftist historians like the American A.J. Mayer then applied the “primacy of domestic policy” thesis and hypothesized that all the European powers had courted war as a means of cowing or distracting their working classes and national minorities.

Such “new left” interpretations triggered intense study of the connections between domestic and foreign policy, leading to the conclusion that a postulation of internal origins of the war, while obvious for Austria and plausible for Russia, failed in the cases of democratic Britain and France. If anything, internal discord made for reticence rather than assertion on the part of their foreign policy elites. The conservative historian Gerhard Ritter even challenged the Fischer thesis in the German case. The real problem, he argued, was not fear of the Social Democrats but the age-old tension between civilian and military influence in the Prussian-German government. Politicians, exemplified by Bethmann, did not share the eagerness or imprudence of the general staff but lost control of the ship of state in the atmosphere of deepening crisis leading up to 1914. Finally, a moderate German historian, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, dispensed with polemics altogether. Germany’s rapid industrialization and the tardiness of modernization in Austria-Hungary and Russia, he concluded, created instabilities in central and eastern Europe that found expression in desperate self-assertion. Echoing Joseph Schumpeter, Mommsen blamed the war on the survival of precapitalist regimes that simply proved “no longer adequate in the face of rapid social change and the steady advance of mass politics.” This interpretation, however, amounted to an updated and elaborated version of the unsophisticated consensus that “we all stumbled into it.” Were the world wars, then, beyond human control?

Thus, the search for long-range causes, while turning up a wealth of new information and insight, ran ultimately aground. After all, if “imperialism” or “capitalism” had caused the war, they had just as assuredly caused the unprecedented era of peace and growth that preceded it. Imperialist crises, though tense at times, had always been resolved, and even Germany’s ambitions were on the verge of being served through a 1914 agreement with Britain on a planned partition of the Portuguese empire. Imperial politics were simply not a casus belli for anyone except Britain. Military preparedness was at a peak, but armaments are responses to tensions, not the cause of them, and they had, perhaps, served to deter war in the numerous crises preceding 1914. Capitalist activity tied the nations of Europe together as never before, and in 1914 most leading businessmen were advocates of peace. The alliance systems themselves were defensive and deterrent by design and had served as such for decades. Nor were they inflexible. Italy opted out of her alliance, the Tsar was not bound to risk his dynasty on behalf of Serbia, or the Kaiser his on behalf of Austria-Hungary, while the French and British cabinets might never have persuaded their parliaments to take up arms had the Schlieffen Plan not forced the issue. Perhaps the 1914 crisis was, after all, a series of blunders, in which statesmen failed to perceive the effects their actions would have on the others.

The centrality of the Habsburg monarchy

Perhaps a long-range view that is still serviceable is precisely the one derived from old-fashioned analysis of the balance-of-power system, forgotten amid the debates over national or class responsibility. This view, suggested by Paul Schroeder in 1972, asks not why war broke out in 1914 but why not before? What snapped in 1914? The answer, he argued, is that the keystone of European balance, the element of stability that allowed the other powers to chase imperial moonbeams at will, was Austria-Hungary itself. The heedless policies of the other powers, however, gradually undermined the Habsburg monarchy until it was faced with a mortal choice. At that point, the most stable member of the system became the most disruptive, the girders of security—the alliances—generated destructive pressures of their own, and the European system collapsed. To be sure, Austria-Hungary was threatened with her own nationality problem, aggravated by Serbia. It could better have met that threat, however, if the Great Powers had worked to ameliorate pressures on it, just as they had carried the declining Ottoman Empire for a full century. Instead, the ambitions of Russia, France, and Britain, and the stifling friendship of Germany, only served to push Austria-Hungary to the brink. This was not their intention, but it was the effect.

The central fact of global politics from 1890 to 1914 was Britain’s relative decline. This occurred naturally, as industrial power diffused, but was aggravated by the particular challenge of Germany. Overextended, the British sought partners to share the burdens of a world empire and were obliged in return to look kindly on those partners’ ambitions. But the resulting Triple Entente was not the cause of Germany’s frustrations in the conduct of Weltpolitik. Rather it was the inability of Germany to pursue an imperial policy à outrance. Situated in the middle of Europe, with hostile armies on two sides, and committed to the defense of Austria-Hungary, Germany was unable to make headway in the overseas world despite her strength. By contrast, relatively weak France or hopelessly ramshackle Russia could engage in adventures at will, suffer setbacks, and return to the fray in a few years. Schroeder concluded: “The contradiction between what Germany wanted to do and what she dared to do and was obliged to do accounts in turn for the erratic, uncoordinated character of German world policy, its inability to settle on clear goals and carry them through, the constant initiatives leading nowhere, the frequent changes in mid-course.” All Germany could do was bluff and hope to be paid for doing nothing: for remaining neutral in the Russo-Japanese War, for not building more dreadnoughts, for letting the French into Morocco, for not penetrating Persia. Of course, Germany could have launched an imperialist war in 1905 or 1911 under more favourable circumstances. It chose not to do so, and German might was such that prior to 1914 the other powers never considered a passage of arms with Germany.

Instead, Triple Entente diplomacy served to undermine Austria-Hungary. Everyone recognized that it was the “sick man of Europe” and that its demise would be inconvenient at very best and would almost certainly expose the ethnic mare’s nest of southeastern Europe to civil war or Russian or German domination. Yet no one did anything about it. France could scarcely afford to—its security was too tightly bound to Russia’s—but France’s policy of wooing Italy out of the Triple Alliance was a grave setback, not for Germany but for Austria-Hungary. Russia brazenly pushed the Slavic nationalities forward, thinking to make gains but never realizing that tsarism was as dependent on Habsburg survival as Austria-Hungary had been on Ottoman survival. Only Britain had the capacity to maneuver, to restrain the likes of Serbia and Russia and take some of the Austro-Hungarian burden off Germany’s shoulders. And indeed it had done so before—in 1815–22, 1878, and 1888. But now the British chose vaguely to encourage Russia in the Balkans, letting Austria-Hungary, as it were, pay the price for distracting Russia from the frontiers of India. So by 1914 Austria was encircled and Germany was left with the choice of watching her only ally collapse or risking a war against all Europe. Having chosen the risk, and lost, it is no surprise that the Germans (as well as the other powers) gave vent to all their prewar bitterness and pursued a thorough revision of world politics in their own favour.